Companies that provide services to customers frequently provide their customers with automated techniques for viewing and/or managing accounts relating to these services. A service company may, for instance, manage a web site designed to allow its customers to login to the web site and view and/or modify information specific to account(s) maintained with the company.
As an example of such a web site, consider a web portal provided by a telecommunication company for its clients. The telecommunication company may operate a variety of back-end systems and networks, such as legacy systems or networks, which were acquired over the years. A particular customer may have a number of different accounts with the company. For example, a customer may be a large corporation with many divisions, each of which may maintain a different account, such as a different long distance or data service account, with the company. Employees in various divisions may be given different access privileges to the various accounts.
The web portal, when providing access to customer service records relating to the various accounts, may request information from the back-end system(s) that contain the requested information. In some situations, there may be numerous back-end systems that may potentially contain the customer information. The status of the back-end systems may be constantly changing. For example, a legacy back-end billing system may be in the process of being phased-out and accounts on this back-end system may be in the process of being migrated to another back-end system. Keeping track of all the back-end systems, and more particularly, determining which back-end systems the web portal needs to access for a particular request can be a difficult task.